The old man lives a sheltered existence, so frail he rarely leaves the Georgian townhouse. His days are spent in the company of a baby grandchild. Yet there can be no tranquillity behind the facade of his Edinburgh home: any day now the elderly guesthouse keeper will face extradition moves on charges of genocide.

Anton Gecas, 84, is second on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted suspected war criminals. Only Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man, Alois Brunner, if he is still alive, precedes him. For years Mr Gecas lived anonymously in Scotland, as a miner, an engineer and as a guesthouse keeper. Then, in 1986, the Nazi-hunting centre named him.

Now proceedings against Mr Gecas are about to take a step further. Last week a judge in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, issued a warrant for Mr Gecas's arrest. He is charged with 13 crimes relating to the genocide of Jews and the mass murder of other civilians in Lithuania and what is now Belarus. A formal request for his extradition will arrive at the Foreign Office within days.

For Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's top Nazi hunter and the man who first pointed the finger at Mr Gecas, it is a defining moment. "I have spent 15 years hunting this bastard and nothing is going to give me greater pleasure than seeing him in court," he said.

"The Lithuanians have done their part, but when the extradition request comes it'll be up to your British system to make sure Gecas is sent to trial."

New evidence

Mr Gecas will be fighting the extradition. "My client maintains his complete innocence of these allegations and if and when an application for extradition is received by the British government we will be fighting it most strongly," said his lawyer, Nigel Duncan.

Key to the extradition battle will be new evidence gathered by Rimvydas Valentukevicius, head of the Lithuanian prosecutor's special investigation unit, with the aid of the US Justice Department. No one will confirm officially the nature of the new evidence but well-placed observers say it is the testimony of those who served alongside Mr Gecas in a battalion.

Shortly after the Germans invaded Lithuania in June 1941, Mr Gecas volunteered for the 12th auxiliary police service battalion as a lieutenant in charge of a platoon. The battalion became one of the second world war's most feared Nazi death squads. Throughout the summer of 1941, it was involved in rounding up and murdering thousands of civilian men, women and children in Lithuania.

In one of the battalion's operations in the town of Slutsk, over two days, around 1,000 Jews were dragged from factories and shops. They were shot and buried in mass graves.

In another operation in Minsk's Jewish ghetto, one member of the battalion remembered Mr Gecas helping in an operation which saw Germans round up a column of Jews "four abreast and more than 300 metres long" in front of specially dug pits. They were all shot.

By the winter of 1941 more than 90% of the country's 220,000 Jews were killed. The battalion moved its operations to Belarus and continued its operations there. Mr Gecas is accused of involvement in the murder of 32,000 civilians.

In a 1987 documentary, Scottish Television said Mr Gecas was a war criminal. Five years later, he lost a £600,000 libel action against the company. He admitted to being involved in six incidents in which soldiers shot civilians, but claimed he was outside the area of the murders. The trial judge, Lord Milligan, said he was "clearly satisfied" he was a war criminal.

Now the Scottish justice minister, Jim Wallace, and an Edinburgh sheriff will have to decide on the weight of evidence against him.

How Mr Gecas got to Edinburgh after the war is a simple story. In 1944, as the tide of the war was changing, he switched sides and joined an invading Polish battalion. He had been decorated by the Germans for his services and he would be decorated too by the Polish army for fighting against the Germans.

In 1947, Mr Gecas travelled to Britain with the Polish army, changed his name from Antanas Gecevicius and was demobbed. He found a job as a miner with the National Coal Board, before he took a course in management at Edinburgh's Heriot Watt University.

He was given British citizenship and, in 1959 when he was 43, he married a 19-year-old nurse, Astrid. They had two children and lived a comfortable existence in their suburban home.

Mr Gecas is well used to pulling the curtains to press and camera crews camped outside his home. He does not give usually interviews but shortly before Christmas he broke his silence for the first time in years.

Accusations

"These accusations have been hard for me and there is not a month which goes by where I am not being attacked as a war criminal," he said. "Every day I worry they may succeed in getting me deported and taking me away from my family."

Those who have followed the case believe he has cause to fret. "I would be astonished if the application is not granted," said Lord Janner, the former Labour MP and British army Nazi hunter. "He was branded a war criminal in the civil action and the Lithuanians believe they have a mass of evidence."

For many Jewish groups, the case of Mr Gecas will be a test of Britain's nerve in its dealings with its last few living citizens who have been accused of second world war atrocities.

His case was the impetus behind the passing of the War Crimes Act in 1991, which enables prosecutions to be brought against naturalised British citizens suspected of offences committed under their previous nationality. But the Crown Office, the Scottish prosecution service, decided there was not enough evidence to bring proceedings against Mr Gecas. There are similar stories across Britain: only one person - Anthony Sawoniuk - has been successfully prosecuted under the act.

The US, and more recently Canada, where many other suspected war criminals fled, deal with these men under immigration law: the US has deported or denaturalised 116 suspected war criminals. The home secretary, Jack Straw, is considering whether similar procedures should be adopted in Britain.

Mr Gecas claims he was merely fighting for his country, with the Germans against the Russians and then with allies against the Germans. "I feel this country is ungrateful for the fighting I did," he said.

Mr Zuroff is unconvinced. "It was opportunism not morality that made him switch sides," he said. "He's an old man, so what? Let him stand trial. This is a brilliant opportunity to bring Gecas before justice. If he's telling the truth, and I'm wrong, what's he got to fear? Your British justice should not ignore this guy again."

About this article

Net closes in on war crimes suspect

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 06.07 EST on Wednesday 28 February 2001.
It was last modified at 06.07 EDT on Friday 7 September 2001.
It was first published at 06.07 EDT on Friday 7 September 2001.